In the spirit of the reveal, here are two Before & Afters. This is what happens when you ignore your life to write a novel. (Not shown: Me eating salt and vinegar chips for dinner because Jarrod is on tour and I'm too busy/lazy to cook anymore. Totally sad.)

It's not pretty, but at least it's tidy. We don't have time for a big garden this year, so we mulched over most of it using whatever was lying around -- black tarp, pine bark, grass clippings, newspaper. We also finally put in the little plantlets that had been dying on our back porch for the last month.

Puny, but alive!

Before you judge me, you should know that even though our backyard may not be beautiful, at least we take care of the front:

You didn't know I was a Vanderbilt?

Moving on . . .

Sable, BEFORE:

BEFORE her summer haircut, but AFTER we realized the people who named her (not us) didn't know what color "sable" was.

Sable, AFTER:

AFTER removal of several pounds of fur (even though, inexplicably, she looks fluffier), but BEFORE I figured out how to eliminate red eye on Photoshop.

And because I can't show one dog without showing the other, here's what Pip has been leaving on our floors lately:

Thanks, buddy. I'm gonna put some blue hair in your water dish now. What do you think about that?

4 comments:

I just finished mowing our yard and yeah, Jarrod and I have a lot in common in our love of the mowing. Oh. Wow. So much...fun.

Hey, if we buy you and Jarrod a bus ticket out to Portland and let you sleep in the back yard will you build a vegetable garden for us too? We'll even feed you 2 meals a day of luke-warm gruel! What do you say -- quite an offer, eh?

Hi, there! I'm Steph, and I wrote ANNA AND THE FRENCH KISS, LOLA AND THE BOY NEXT DOOR, and ISLA AND THE HAPPILY EVER AFTER. I also edited the romantic holiday anthology MY TRUE LOVE GAVE TO ME and the upcoming SUMMER DAYS & SUMMER NIGHTS.